


New Age Prophet

by oh-lord-heal-this-dyke (m122y)



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, i plan to use an espresso machine as a metaphor for repressed emotion, mixed canon between book and tv (leans more on tv), mostly shenanigans with occasional character work, spoilers: anathema's a lesbian
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-07
Updated: 2019-07-07
Packaged: 2020-06-23 21:16:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19709605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/m122y/pseuds/oh-lord-heal-this-dyke
Summary: Pepper can tell the future. Her prophecies are neither nice nor accurate.---Pepper had already figured it out. She was clever, and more than that she needed to speak the loudest out of everyone, and she couldn’t very well do that if people went about figuring her business out for her.So there were no revelations. There was no shock or confusion or slow trickle of information as puzzle pieces were meticulously slotted together. There was certainly no dramatic irony. There was only the Them running through the woods, Pepper declaring, “Brian’s about to twist his ankle,” and Brian following through. He tumbled head over heels to the bottom of a shallow gulch. He screamed on the way down.





	New Age Prophet

Pepper had already figured it out. She was clever, and more than that she needed to speak the loudest out of everyone, and she couldn’t very well do that if people went about figuring her business out for her.

So there were no revelations. There was no shock or confusion or slow trickle of information as puzzle pieces were meticulously slotted together. There was certainly no dramatic irony. There was only the Them running through the woods, Pepper declaring, “Brian’s about to twist his ankle,” and Brian following through. He tumbled head over heels to the bottom of a shallow gulch. He screamed on the way down. 

The rest of the children slid down the gravel embankment to gather around him. 

“How’d you do that?” Adam asked. No one paid much attention to Brian’s gasps of pain, because none of their injuries were ever bad enough to last.[1]

> [1] _All four of the Them had kept in perfect health from the formation of their gang until present day. It would’ve interrupted their fun to catch a cold or break an arm. Pepper had never been vaccinated (her mother’s doing) but she’d never been sick either (which was Adam’s). Her miraculous immune system had been used as anecdotal evidence in several lengthy Facebook rebuttals, which ought to say something about good deeds and their relative tendency to go unpunished._

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” said Pepper. 

“You made him do that,” Adam insisted, pointing to where Dog had pounced on poor prone Brian, licking his face with vigour. “I heard you. You said he was going to twist his ankle, and then he did. You made him.” 

“I heard you, too,” Wensleydale added helpfully. “That’s what you said.”

“So how’d you do it?” repeated Adam, sounding just a little territorial about the whole affair. 

“I didn’t make him do anything,” said Pepper, crossing her arms. “I just knew that it was going to happen. I saw it this morning.”

“Like on the news?” asked Brian, sour. 

“No, it’s more in my head, like a very strong idea that I know is true. If I think really hard, or sometimes I don’t even have to try, I can see what’s going to happen next.”

“And you didn’t warn me?” Brian said. He brushed leaves from his pants and stood. His ankle smarted, but already he could put weight on it. 

Pepper shrugged. “I wanted to see if I was right.” 

“You wanted to see if you could predict the future,” said Adam. “If you were a witch.” 

“I think I am a witch. I can’t ride a broom or brew potions or see any auroras, but I can see that after dinner today my grandparents are going to get into a row. Wensleydale, you’re going to lose your glasses tomorrow morning, but then you’re going to remember me telling you that you find them behind the bed and you’ll find them. And later we’re all going to get into a rock fight with the Johnsonites.”[2]

> [2] _After the events that had transpired—that is, the singular event that hadn’t transpired—a little over a year ago, the Them had felt rather foolish putting genuine stock into their feud with the Johnsonites. But gradually they’d remembered they were children. They had time to be foolish, and they took their rivalry very seriously._

“Can you tell who’s going to win the next World Cup?” asked Brian. “What about lotto numbers?” 

“When are humans going to start living on Mars?” asked Wensleydale. 

“Do you know what we’ll all be when we grow up?” asked Adam. 

“Wensley’s going to work in an office all day typing numbers,” said Pepper, focusing for a moment. “And he’ll have two cats and a weird frog in a tank.” Her words, despite being of little importance to the overall scheme of the universe, rang with a heavy gong of truth, like the starting gun to a slow race that once started had no alternative but to be completed. It was one thing to see—which had been going on for a while—but it was another thing entirely to share. 

There was a moment of serious contemplation before Wensleydale spoke. “Does it look like a lump of wet gum?” He meant the frog. 

Pepper blinked back to her vision—a bit like tabbing to the page in a book she’d stuck her finger in—and found it again. “Yeah,” she said. 

“An Australian green tree frog. Brilliant.” 

Pepper stuck out her tongue and whisked the image of the frog away. It really did look like something ABC.

“What about me?” asked Adam. “Will I still have Dog?” 

Nobody, not even really Adam, doubted that Dog would remain at Adam’s side as long as he so wished, but still Pepper cast her mind forward. However, instead of meeting with the smooth highway of certainty that she’d cruised along to divine Wensleydale’s future, she became lost in a tangle of backstreets and roundabouts. The path twisted and branched and looped over itself. After taking a turn down a particular, demonically-contrived motorway, Pepper blinked back to reality. 

“I don’t know,” she confessed. “I can’t see it.” 

“Not a very good witch then, huh?” said Brian, who was still sore about his tumble. 

“Maybe you just need some practice,” suggested Adam. “Powers aren’t something you just suddenly have and then they’re perfect—you have to exercise them for a bit. Let’s go into the village and you can make some predictions.” 

Sneakers beat over hard packed earth as the quartet ran the trails they’d long ago memorized back to the village. They hoped a metal cattle gate onto the main road and fished their bikes from the grassy ditch. Dog hopped into Adam’s basket without being asked. As they pedalled, the boys invented superpowers of their own so that even if Pepper’s future sight turned out to be a dud, at least they’d get a new game out of it. Wensleydale picked invisibility and Brian picked super-strength. Adam didn’t pick anything. 

They arrived in town and whittled away the afternoon pointing out passerby in the village square—interrupted briefly by a rock fight with the Johnsonites—and having Pepper foresee their immediate actions. It was a lot of “he’ll walk down that road” or “she’ll say this asinine thing”. Occasionally, Adam would silently suggest that someone turn down a road contrary to what Pepper had predicted, and the poor bystander would of course listen, and then they’d quarrel. 

“You can’t keep sabotaging me, Adam,” Pepper said.

“Well, if you were a real witch, then you’d be able to see that I’d tell them to go somewhere different, wouldn’t you?”

“I thought you were going to stop using those powers, anyways,” said Wensleydale. “Anathema told us how dangerous that is.” 

Adam shrugged. “I dunno. I don’t see what’s wrong with it. Nothing bad happened when I set everything back last year.”[3]

> [3] _Adam still had all the powers that had been unveiled to him on his eleventh birthday. Sometimes he’d parade them out like a party trick, and every time he did the notion occurred to him that while the world hadn’t ended per se, this world he lived in now was still new and different and_ his. _It ate at him. It ate at him slowly, like a worm tunneling to the surface of a very stubborn apple._

“You’re still being a total dick,” said Pepper. 

“But it doesn’t make sense, does it? You get it right every other time.” 

It didn’t make sense. Pepper knew it didn’t. But again, she’d known this for a while—none of this was new to her. 

She’d had the first inkling of her powers when she’d woken up one morning to a day eclipsed entirely by déjà vu. Everything she did that day, everything that happened to her and everything that happened around her, she’d seen it all before in some foggy way. It was like revisiting an old dream. 

And like any other child when faced with a pear-shaped occurrence, she immediately reached out to see if she could control it. And she could. She forecast the weather for the next week. She called fifty coin tosses in a row with perfect accuracy. She won two dollars off Brian in a bet—something he’d later demand reimbursement for. She figured it all out. 

But what she couldn’t understand is why some destinies were more noodly than others. When she tried to focus on them they split out of control and struck her between the eyes with a vicious headache. It infuriated her. It was like trying to catch a cloud to pin it down, or keep a wave upon the sand, or hold a moonbeam in your hand. And sometimes it mucked up her predictions. 

“I think,” said Wensleydale, “that we should go see Anathema.[4] She’s a witch.”

> [4] _Anathema was staying another year at Jasmine Cottage to remap the local ley lines, all of which had scrambled themselves into strange new patterns not entirely unlike the doodles found underneath the desks in a middle school science class. Two of the five patterns she’d mapped thus far were definitively, if crudely, phallic. Certain demonic entities would have been overjoyed if not for their having standards._

“But she can’t see the future,” said Brian. 

“But she knows someone who did,” said Adam. “Her great-great-great-great-grandmother or whatever.” And then he did something rare: he looked to Pepper for her approval on the plan. 

“Yeah,” said Pepper. “That’s a good idea. She’s about to set fire to her kitchen, so it should be fun.” 

✉ ✉ ✉ ✉ ✉

Anathema had invited Newt over for what they both assumed was a date. They’d had rather more than six of them so far. The first had involved a talk about car insurance and the practicalities of listing “tea leaf divination” as a skill on a CV, and they’d only gotten better from there. The second had been a shopping trip. 

Currently, they were hovering over Anathema’s gas stove and scrying into a deep, copper pot. Anathema saw discomfort and anxiety, unease and irritability. Newt saw a curry with one foot in the grave. 

Neither of them knew a thing about cooking, but after Anathema had spent more than several months living off cream cheese sandwiches and canned soup she was willing to try, and Newt was more or less willing to help. 

“Was it a good idea to boil the potatoes beforehand, you think?” asked Newt, fishing out a lump of gritty starch from the bottom of the pot. 

“Maybe it’ll melt into the rest of it,” Anathema said. “You know, make it thicker.” But she pulled a face. If the curry had an aura, it would be crying for help in colour theory. 

“Like a really watery mash,” said Newt. 

“We could turn it into a mash. May as well make something out of nothing. Water evaporates, so if we turn the heat up it ought to boil the water out and then…” She left the sentence to hang, having no idea what to put at the end of it. 

“Okay,” said Newt.

He cranked the heat. An element on the opposite side of the stove jumped to life, and a pile of onion skin paper that was lying nearby caught flame. They screamed. 

The Them came charging through the back door—which Anathema had long given up on locking—and Pepper threw the afghan blanket she’d swiped off the neighbor’s clothesline onto the fire. She then proceeded to pummel the smoldering fabric with her fists. 

“Whoa!” said Newt. “Whoa, whoa.” He’d flung himself back and was half a step away from sprawling over the kitchen table. 

“What in the world is going on?” asked Anathema as she helped Pepper to finish smothering the fire. 

“Pepper’s a witch,” said Brian. 

“She can see the future,” said Wensleydale. 

“Most of it,” said Adam. 

“Don’t eat that curry unless you want to make best friends with your toilet,” said Pepper. She didn’t need powers to be accurate on that one. 

“You all need to slow down,” said Anathema, gathering the scorched blanket into her arms to survey the damage. The papers were toast, but the curry was unfortunately unharmed. “What are you doing here?” 

“We need your advice,” said Adam. “Or your magazines or something, but Pepper’s got witch powers now and we need to know why.”

“Or she needs to know how to control them,” said Wensleydale. 

“I know how to control them,” said Pepper, crossing her arms, “and I don’t care why. What I want to know is why I can’t see everything that I want to.”

Anathema blinked. “You have powers?” 

The Them turned to face her as one. “Yes!”[5]

> [5] _Children in the know work on an excruciatingly different timescale from adults outside of it. The Them were currently being subjected to a kind of torture most analogous to episode 11, season 3 of the American sci-fi series_ Star Trek _._

A chill went through Anathema, but she maintained composure. She smiled tightly. “How about Newt and I clean this up, and then we can all have a talk about it over some lemonade?” 

Anathema made better lemonade than she made curry—or any other foodstuffs that didn’t come out of a package for that matter—and Newt trotted out a tin of butter cookies. The kids cleared the kitchen table, moving stacks of books and empty tea mugs to random end tables and empty shelf space. But there were only so many chairs, and Newt and Anathema elected to stand until Pepper forced Newt into her seat. 

“If we’re talking about me,” she said, “then I’m going to stand while we do it.” 

“Alright,” said Anathema. “Tell me everything.” 

The kitchen promptly devolved into a cacophony. Adam went over the events of the afternoon in detail, Wensleydale described a documentary on the fourth dimension he’d seen, and Brian complained about his ankle. Several times Anathema tried to regain order and failed.

“You rolled your ankle?” said Newt above the din. “Are you okay?”

Brian nodded, but Wensleydale blocked him from view as he reached for another cookie, saying, “So if you think about it, it’s that the rest of us are just time-blind, like colourblind, like Dog.” 

“Dog is colourblind?” asked Newt. Dog barked from where he was sat on the floor, and Newt threw him a biscuit from the jar Anathema kept on the counter. Adam tossed one, too. 

“But for some reason she can’t see my future,” Adam said. “Every time I turned someone the other way, she never saw it coming. So is that just because I’m... y’know? Or maybe I don’t have a future?”

“Of course you have a future,” said Newt.

“Newt,” said Anathema. 

“Everyone has a future.”

“Newt!” she said again and shook his shoulder. He looked up at her with his puppy-blank eyes. She sighed. “Could you and the boys all step outside for a while? Pepper and I should talk. Girl talk.”

“Oh,” he said, then he properly clued in. “Oh! Okay, we’ll be out in the garden then.” He pushed away from the table, and his chair made a horrible screeching sound. 

“What?” Brian complained. “How come we’ve got to go?”

“Witch talk,” insisted Anathema. “One on one.”

Newt held the door open and shepherded the boys into the backyard. “Come on, everybody out. Let’s go.” 

“Oh, and Adam?” Anathema said.

“Yeah?” said Adam, turning around a little too eager with the hope he’d be invited to stay. He wasn’t used to being ushered into the wings. 

“I told you that you shouldn’t be using your backdoor privileges anymore. We don’t know if there are consequences that we aren’t seeing yet.” 

Adam pulled a face. He hadn’t forgotten everything she’d already told him, but all the same, he wasn’t ready to let go of who he was just yet. Every time he used his influence, it felt the same amount of wrong as it did right. 

“Last one out,” prompted Newt, and Adam went to go join the other two boys sitting on the Jasmine Cottage wall. Newt smiled at Anathema, and she returned the sentiment, if a little tight-lipped. 

She liked Newt. She really did. He was sweet and genuine—maybe too genuine—and easy to be around. Agnes had told her that she’d fuck Newt under a bed in the storm before the End That Never Was, but she hadn’t told Anathema what she was meant to take away from the experience. She’d taken Newt, and so far she’d kept him. If she had to date a boy, why shouldn’t it be him?[6] They already had each other. It was convenient.

> [6] _This statement was akin to wondering aloud that if one had to wear a jacket in the middle of the Sahara, why shouldn’t it be made of wool? If one had to eat boiled snails on toast, why shouldn’t the bread be whole wheat?_

The door banged shut, and Pepper and Anathema were alone.

“Thanks,” said Pepper. 

“No problem. Did you foresee us having to kick them out?”

“I wasn’t looking for that,” Pepper said. “I don’t have to see if I don’t want to. I can shut it off when I don’t need it.”

“Interesting,” said Anathema. She pulled up a newly vacant chair and sat down. After a brief moment of hesitation Pepper joined her, shoving a cookie in between her teeth and pouring herself a tall glass of lemonade. “But you said that you can’t see everything?”

“No,” said Pepper, crumbs spraying. “I can’t see everyone’s future, and if I start looking too far down the road then everything gets all dark.”

“Dark?” 

“Hard to see.” Pepper had been uncharacteristically quiet during the boys’ uproar, and the reason for that was that she was sending her mind forward, starting from the present in the kitchen and working outwards. She’d hit her limit far sooner than she had in the forest. “Sometimes, and with some people it’s hard. And then I get sort of lost.” 

“What do you mean, ‘lost’?” 

“Because the future just goes everywhere,” said Pepper, making an expansive, frustrated hand gesture. “Whoosh! I start looking and it’s a mess. Some stupid people have more than sixteen futures.”

“That can’t be right,” Anathema said. “Agnes never— Well, you’d think her book would be a lot bigger if she had to accommodate that much variation. And you wouldn’t be able to claim that they’re accurate. Plus, she was able to predict centuries into the future.” 

“So I’m a shitty witch,” said Pepper. “I came to you so I could fix that.” 

Anathema had been doing her best to forget all about Agnes Nutter and her prophecies. Towards that end, she’d kept Jasmine Cottage and was waffling away her time doing random occult inquiries instead of going back to face her family. She supposed she could go back to school again, maybe find a job as a librarian—she had the degrees for it—but she hadn’t quite decided yet. No doubt, most of that would mean leaving Newt behind. 

“What do you see in my future?” Anathema asked. “Just out of curiosity.”

Pepper concentrated. “You’re going to make yourself a sandwich for dinner.”

“No, a little further.”

Pepper shut her eyes tight. “I don’t know.” 

“You don’t know?”

“Yes, I don’t know!” Pepper’s eyes flew open, glaring. She took a swig of lemonade. “You’re hurting my head.”

Anathema sighed. “But you’re sure you’re psychic?”

“Are you sure you can ride a bike? I predicted Brian’s ankle, and before that I called like a million coin tosses in a row. In just a second, your boyfriend’s going to— “ There was a shout from the backyard followed by childish laughter. “Yeah, you’re going to want to get a new garden bench.”

Well, thought Anathema, she certainly spoke with the same tone as Agnes’s book. She rose from the table and went rifling through her pantry. “Have you noticed any other abilities beginning to surface? Can you see auras? Can you feel the currents of energy that pass through the air?” With ferocious speed, she plucked an apricot from her fruit bowl and hurled it square at Pepper’s head.

Pepper caught it perfectly. It smacked her palm. She took a bite but spat it out. “This isn’t even ripe. Nice throw, though.”

“Thanks,” said Anathema, sounding defeated. “But no auras?”

“Nope,” said Pepper, popping the P. “No chakras or kumbayas or nothing. Just future-seeing.”

Anathema sat back down and faced off with Earth’s newest prophetess. “And what are you planning on doing with your future-seeing?”

“I haven’t thought that far ahead,” Pepper said, “but I guess I should have some fun with it. You never know if it’ll suddenly go away and I’ll miss my chance.” 

“Right,” said Anathema, doubting that very much. She’d never get that lucky. “Well, you know what I think you ought to do with it?”

“What?”

“Just ignore it. Pretend like this never happened.” 

Pepper frowned. “Seriously?” 

“You said it yourself that it hurts your head, and Agnes never wrote anything about how her powers developed, if they developed. I always got the impression she was born with them. This is a no-man’s land, magically speaking.”

“No! I can’t just— You’re telling me that if you suddenly found out you could tell the future you wouldn’t be handing out predictions left and right?”

Anathema leaned back in her chair and looked askance at the spot on her shelf that was once occupied by a hefty cardbox. She imagined it being replaced and subsequently filled, this time by Pepper. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. It messes with the whole concept of free will, knowing the future.” 

“Oh, forget that! Just because I’m not looking at the future doesn’t mean it isn’t there. I just have to think of what to do with my powers, but it’s not going to be nothing.” 

Anathema toyed with a butter cookie until it split in half. “Next thing you’ll tell me is you’ve always wanted to write a book and foster a long lineage of descendants that’ll reach down through the ages.” 

“A what?”

“A family,” Anathema clarified. “Have you ever thought of starting a family one day?” 

Pepper leaned over the table suspiciously. “Are you saying that just because I’m a girl?”[7]

> [7] _It was entirely possible that Pepper had developed somewhat of a complex surrounding her femininity, as tended to happen when one was outnumbered as a woman-shaped entity in one’s friend group, work place, or cult classic paperback._

Anathema gave her a weary look. “No. Believe me, I’m not. I was just wondering.”

“You’re not being helpful at all,” said Pepper. “I came to you because I wanted to know why I can’t see the whole future like I want to. I thought you’d know.”

“Well, I don’t. I’m not Agnes. I only ever followed what Agnes told me, and I’m not even doing that anymore, so you could say that I don’t know what to do at all. But I do know that this is something that should be left well enough alone.” 

“Too bad I’m not going to.” 

The two of them stared at each other. They sank deep into the wordless stand-off, and they likely would have stayed there indefinitely had Anathema not remembered she was talking to a twelve-year-old and began to feel silly. 

“I’m sorry,” she said, coming off it. “I got rather heated right there.”

“Mhm,” said Pepper. “So, are you going to help me or not?”

Anathema relented with all the grace of a mother conceding that she’d prefer her children to do their drinking in the house. The new Agnes Nutter ought to have at least some mentorship. “I suppose, but I thought we’d already realized I’m not much help after all,” she said. 

“Haven’t you read about other prophets besides your great-great-whatever? Like, at least one of them has to have written a handbook.” 

“Future-Telling 101?” mused Anathema. “I can’t say I’ve read that one.”

“Doesn’t mean it isn’t out there.” 

Anathema thought for a moment. She’d calmed down and was giving in to her natural curiosity as a scholar of the occult. “I may know a place,” she said, hesitant, but already her words were picking up steam. “I can’t promise you anything, but for some months now I’ve been receiving… invitations from a book seller.” 

“Invitations? Like, to a party?”

“No, business invitations. Propositions. And this guy’s not so much a book seller as a professional badgerer. I keep finding his business cards tucked all over the house, behind picture frames, in my cereal, floating down the chimney. I could paper my walls with them.”

“That’s dedication,” said Pepper. “What’s he want with you?”

Anathema tapped the side of her head. “See, I’ve got all of Agnes’s prophecies memorized, and somehow he’s caught wind of that and wants me to transcribe them. It’d be a restoration of sorts. He says he’s got a big collection of prophetic books already, but that he’d love— “

“Then there must be something in at least one of those books about how to get yourself started,” said Pepper. “It’s perfect.”

“I wouldn’t say perfect. If I show up on his doorstep looking for a favour, well, there’s no such thing as a free meal.”

“You don’t have to come with me,” said Pepper. With her new powers to guide her, she was feeling incredibly confident. “I’m sure I could find my way on my own.”

“Oh no,” said Anathema. “No way am I sending a little girl to London all by herself to meet some shady books dealer.”

“He’s in London? Where in London?” 

“I’ll take you first thing tomorrow, how about that?” said Anathema. “We’ll make a day of it.” 

Pepper narrowed her eyes. She’d always thought Anathema was cool in a prim, stuffy sort of way, but now with all the dissuading and overbearing caution, Pepper’s opinion was beginning to sour. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to. Newt poked his head back through the door. 

“Anathema,” he said, voice ringed with guilt. The whole time Anathema and Pepper had been talking, he and the boys had been struggling to put the legs back on the garden bench. “I might need your help with something.” 

As Anathema went to the door to peer out, Pepper went into her mind to peer forward. It was then that she issued her first real prophecy—silently and to herself, and with nowhere near the amount of dramatic verve that later prophecies would contain. The prophecy was this: 

> 1: There’s a business card tucked between the books on the middle shelf. Anathema hasn’t noticed it yet, and she won’t notice it missing after Pepper takes it either. 

So as Pepper rounded the table to follow Anathema, she paused at the shelf. She ran her fingers along the tops of the books. Her fingers snagged on a piece of gold-gilt cardstock. She pulled it free, saw the flash of an address, and tucked it into her pocket.[8]

> [8] _Philosophers have long toiled over the question of whether a properly performed bootstrap paradox would tear apart the fabric of space-time or not. The answer is no, provided the narrator is cheeky about it._

When Anathema saw the state of her poor bench, she tutted. She’d likely have to ask one of the neighbors to please come have a look at it, but not before Newt gave it his best shot first. He needed to lay his guilt to rest, and that meant making it worse before it got better. 

“This might take a while,” she said. “You kids should all run home for supper. It’s getting late.”

Pepper nodded in unison with the rest of the Them, feeling the card burn a metaphorical hole in her pocket. 

“First thing tomorrow?” Anathema said to her with a wink. 

“First thing tomorrow,” agreed Pepper.

But little did Anathema know that by the time she was on her first thing, Pepper would be well onto her third or fourth. This trend would continue for much of Pepper’s life.

**Author's Note:**

> updates whenever; i write off the cuff


End file.
